Intel's big gag at IDF made during Pat Gelsinger's presentation was demonstrating an Itanium-based Hitachi blade server system running Sun Microsystems' Solaris OS, calling it the "highest performing SPARC machine in the industry." This demo was done with the help of Transitive, a virtualization vendor whose Quick-Transit technology allows applications that have been compiled for one operating system and processor to run on servers that use a different processor and operating system.

Charles King has penned an article, Intel's Itanium -- time to reconsider?, which highlights several points which I agree with.

• Itanium sales are still anemic when compared against IBM POWER and Sun UltraSPARC-based servers
• ...despite positive news and good vibes, Montecito's arrival obscured a singular issue: Itanium's failure to deliver on promises originally proposed by Intel and its primary IA-64 partner HP.
• Intel continues to press Itanium's potential as a replacement/migration solution for competing UNIX platforms, HP is the only vendor that is likely to gain significantly from that position.
• Transitive's Solaris-to-Itanium migration demo at IDF was technically interesting, we do not believe the company's solutions will drive significant revenues toward Itanium vendors or customers away from Sun and IBM's UNIX solutions

We'll see what the future holds.........but I doubt that there will be many (if any) customers running Solaris/SPARC apps on Itanium.